


Not There

by Ravenshell



Category: Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles (TV 2003), Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles (TV 2012), Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles - All Media Types
Genre: 13 Days of Halloween, 13 Days of Horror, Cemetery, Delusions, Ghosts, Reaper - Freeform, ghost - Freeform, graveyard, seeing things
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-10-28
Updated: 2020-10-28
Packaged: 2021-03-09 02:21:06
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,395
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/27237166
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Ravenshell/pseuds/Ravenshell
Summary: Raphael is definitely not seeing and hearing what he is absolutely seeing and hearing.Written for the 13 Days of Halloween.  Day 9's prompt: Seeing Things/Delusions.  Third in the Grave Guardians trifecta. (See entries for Days 4 and 5.)
Comments: 2
Kudos: 6





	Not There

The plan was simple enough: scout around the graveyard for kids who were up to no good, and mess with ‘em until they left, or chase them out. Don even designed a voice modulator, to make whoever was wearing it sound al deep-voice and spooky and super intimidating. Raph was hoping to get a crack at using it later on, because Fearless Leader of course got to use it first, the spoiled jerk.

Still, Raph had to admit screwing with people who deserved it was one of his favorite pastimes. Granted, in their line of work, they didn’t run into a whole lot of people who _didn’t_ bring upon themselves the kind of wrack and ruin dealt them by the turtles. If he wanted to get into the deep reflection type of thing Leo favored, they were a sort of green, reptilian karma. Except Mikey, maybe. He would happily adopt anyone they ran across rather than giving them what was coming to them.

After Mikey negotiated his position as team spooky-sound-effects guy, they went stealth, dodging silently across the graveyard, looking for wrongdoers. Every Halloween, teenagers were out in force, hopping the cemetery fence to go play around in the spoopy surroundings. Some were on dares. Some wanted to see or contact a ghost. Some… were there to wreck shit. And these were the groups the turtles were there to scare off. And somehow, doing it in face- and body-obscuring costumes felt more appropriate to the holiday. There was a difference running someone off as a weird mutant turtle and a ghost or a grim reaper. Leo had even planned for the eventuality of having to throw his jack-o-lantern head at some particularly dumb kid, whereupon he could just tuck his head into his shell and appear headless. Raph was itching for the opportunity to call him Headless Leader at some point tonight. He himself was decked out as a grim reaper in a hooded black cloak with a somewhat see-though panel over the face.

Don, in his glowy bone-suit, appeared briefly from behind a tomb on his left, and he tracked Leo’s movements up ahead of them… He assumed Mikey was somewhere behind him, as he hadn’t spotted him. The kid managed to keep his mouth shut while stealthing for once. 

They made a wide circle around a group using ghost-hunting equipment, so as not to be caught on any sort of infra-red cameras, and left them to their messing around, but it wasn’t long before they ran across a group of slightly drunken teens tagging and kicking over headstones. He growled under his breath.

The creepy noises started before Raph thought that Mikey could have possibly gotten in place, especially since they seemed to be coming from the other side of the group… Mikey would have had to skirt the group before he could start, and hadn’t he been behind Raph? And man, was he nailing the blood-curdling noises!

He winged a couple rocks at the troublemakers, careful not to his the little ladybug of the group, as she seemed insistent that the others stop wrecking things. Good for her, for all it did to get them to stop, which was little to nothing. But that was where their job started.

A tree overhanging the group would be the ideal perch, he decided, scaling it up to the first strong bough with almost no effort. He checked the position of the others… Don, darting around, showing himself just enough to get noticed. Leo, ducking behind a grave, where he could jump out and pull his boogity-boogity act on the teens. And Mikey…? He looked toward the source of the ghastly moans, seeing no trace of a Charlie Brown ghost, but a weird sparkling, see-through vapor of some sort, hovering over the headstones. It almost had the shape of a woman with long, flowing hair and an airy dress that trailed out to the side in the wind… A low moan reached his ear holes on the wind.

 _No, I did NOT just see that…_ he told himself adamantly, and looked away. He’d look back in a moment, he told himself, and figure out what he was looking at while Leo was booming at the intruders. He snuck a look. Nothing.

Honestly, it was more disturbing that there wasn’t something white and gossamer to see out there, nothing to confirm what he’d initially seen. Either he was seeing things, or it was there, and now had moved, which wasn’t comforting at all.

But he had other things he needed to focus on. One of the boys had pulled a knife. Granted, he was holding it like an amateur and looked like he was about to wet himself, but Raph didn’t take any chances, slinging a shuriken to knock the blade out of his hand. The shuriken decapitated the fake knife, and the teen’s jaw worked like he was trying to scream, but no sound came out. _Oh. Plastic. Of course it was plastic… what kind of moron would go around with real weapons for Halloween?_ He looked over the group again and decided, on the other hand, he wouldn’t put it past them. _Idiots_ , he thought as Leo chased the leading hoodlum and his friends to the gates,

The whispering came up again, words indiscernible, sounding like it was right behind the tree. “Knock it off, Mike,” he muttered, gritting his teeth and hoping his little brother would cut it out instead of being a jerk. Probably too much to hope for.

“… _there is no Mike here…_ ” a whisper said, right behind his head, and a bolt of ice went down his spine.

He could turn around and look… sure he could, he convinced himself. If he wanted to. But he wouldn’t. If there was something there—say, a transparent woman with sunken cheeks and withered features, with no eyeballs in her sockets—he would never sleep again. The image he conjured up for himself was bad enough! If he saw it, he would have to admit it was real, and he just didn’t want to have to deal with that. Instead, he jumped down out of the tree to deal with the abandoned trick-or-treater holding Leo’s pumpkin head in her arms. “You tryin’ ta get ahead in life, or can I take that off your hands?”

“Oh, um… All yours,” the ladybug girl stammered, handing off the jack-o-lantern to him.

Leo showed back up, and the laugh he got at the girl calling Leo out on the voice modulator was a welcome distraction, but he didn’t really breathe a sigh of relief until Michelangelo showed up on a path near the gates. Whew… the thing he had seen had not gotten him. Of course it hadn’t, because it wasn’t really there. But Raph’s eye ticced a little when Michelangelo declared to the eldest, “Leo, there’s real ghosts here…”

 _No there’s not, nutball; don’t say that…_ he thought to himself, _‘cuz if you saw somethin’ too, that might mean this ain’t all in my head…_

Again, he welcomed the distraction of helping the ladybug over the fence, but his hope that Mikey would for once shut up did not hold out.

“I’m telling you guys, there’s real ghosts here! How come you never see what I see?!”

“We’re not the ones seein’ things… That pretty much covers it,” Raph jeered, to take the attention off his own anxious mood. 

Unfortunately, they had to go back into the depths of the cemetery for hours of patrolling yet. He caught a smudge of white out of the corner of his eye as they went back to scouting. Mikey was waving toward it. Raph pulled his hood up further so that it blocked his peripheral vision, but it didn’t block the eerie singing of “Byeeee, sweeetiiiieeee, eeeeeee… Eeeeeee! Ouuuhhhh…”

Raph wasn’t sure if that was directed at Michelangelo or himself. But it didn’t matter, of course, because it didn’t exist. _Ignore…_ he told himself. _Ignore, ignore, ignore… It ain’t really there. We’ll talk to Don about it, and he’ll explain it away with something more comforting, like… a brain tumor. Or that I’m as crazy as Mikey. Ugh… maybe I’ll just keep this to myself…._ he decided.

“Did you guys hear something?” Leo asked, looking around at the strange sounds.

“No. Nobody heard anything,” Raph said adamantly.


End file.
